10/30/16

On 1/3/2008 I bought a Dell XPS 420 quad core PC. I believe it came with Windows Vista installed.

Last week, after eight years and nine months, it started crashing to the dreaded blue screens of death. I worked for many hours to rescue the machine from whatever it was that caused the crashes: corrupted device drivers or malware or hardware malfunction. I reverted updates, scrubbed registries, removed many old programs, ran defragmenters and virus defender software.

OK. I got the unit working now smooth and fast, It has not crashed for a day. I maybe even fixed it. But meanwhile I ordered a new Dell XPS 8900 i7 computer. I got a good deal direct from Dell with discounts and a good service plan included.

Nearly nine years is enough. All computers die eventually. Even the good ones.

Behold the utterly unselfconscious Orthodox writer: Let the girls and women dance with the torah once a year - the rest of the year, watch their Divine joy dissipate and their spiritual elevation vanish.

10/10/16

Kol Nidre is a prayer of compassion encased in a legal idiom of vow nullification.

On its surface, Kol Nidre looks like a legal boilerplate to cancel and release a person from spoken vows.

But if it looks like a prayer, and sounds like a prayer, then it is a prayer. The Kol Nidre meditation comes from our hearts and souls fully clothed in the cultural garb of our community. It is expressed in the way that the meditative masters of our faith think, and the way they talk.

And so the deep emotional utterance of Kol Nidre comes forth out of our mouths in a legal idiom, the way the rabbinic masters chose to express their meditation, acting in the archetypal mode of the scribe archetype that is so familiar to them.

As part of their jobs, our archetypal scribes keep track of vows. Like good accountants, they keep their “spreadsheets” of which vows are in effect and which have been nullified. And they know the means to move a vow from one column to the other.

10/6/16

My Jewish Standard Dear Rabbi Zahavy Column for October 2016: Binging at Weddings and Not Believing in SinDear Rabbi Zahavy,I went to a big Orthodox Jewish family wedding recently in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. The music was so loud that some of my relatives, who had expected it, brought along earplugs. There was so much food at the smorgasbord and the main meal that the next day I weighed myself and saw I had gained more than three pounds in one night.I’m tempted to turn down invitations to future frum family simchas just to keep my hearing intact and my waistline under control. Is that a reasonable course of action?Binging in Bergenfield

Dear Binging,

Sure you can skip family weddings to preserve your health and well-being, and you should do that if you have no other solution. But some of your kin seem to have found modalities that allow them to participate and preserve their hearing. Surely ear plugs are an option for you too. Why not avail yourself of them?

And regarding the food, you know that you do not have to eat all of it! One possible alternative is to attend the smorg and the chuppah and gracefully decline the elaborate dinner that follows. Who needs to drive home at midnight from Brooklyn anyway? Of course, doing that you will miss the chance to bond and share at greater length with your family. But with such loud bands, how much schmoozing could you do with the relatives anyway?